Manager, Engineering at Handshake (San Francisco, CA)
Handshake· San Francisco, CA·
Role details
Handshake at a glance
Handshake is the career network for the AI economy, pairing a three-sided student-employer-school job marketplace with a fast-growing AI training-data business that supplies frontier labs.
Handshake runs a three-sided marketplace connecting job seekers, employers, and college career centers, with matching, profiles, and skill-building. In 2025 it launched Handshake AI, which turns its network of educated members into a contractor workforce that produces training data and evaluations for frontier AI labs.
$434M raised · latest: Series F · $200M · Jan 2022 · $3.5B valuation · backed by Coatue Management, Valiant Peregrine Fund, Kleiner Perkins, Spark Capital
Job description
About Handshake
Handshake was founded on a simple belief that everyone deserves a path to a great career, regardless of where they went to school or who they know. Today, we power 25 million job seekers, 1 million+ employers, and 1,600 educational institutions. In 2025, we started Handshake AI and built the fastest-growing AI data business in history. We work directly with frontier AI lab researchers to create evaluations, publish benchmarks, and push the boundary of data. We’ve grown from $0 to ~$1B run rate and pay ~$60M to over 30K individuals every month. Why join Handshake now:
- Shape how every career evolves in the AI economy, at global scale, with impact your friends, family and peers can see and feel
- Partner hand-in-hand with world-class AI labs, Fortune 500 partners and the world’s top educational institutions
- Work together with engineers, scientists, operators, and more from Palantir, Meta, Scale AI, and former YC founders
- Build a massive, fast-growing business with billions in revenue
Location: San Francisco, CA — 5 days/week in-office
About the Role
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a high-impact engineering team within Handshake Careers. You’ll own the engineering of a new, agent-first product for industry recruiting: the future of how companies find, evaluate, and reach experienced talent. Recruiting teams work through hours of manual searching, filtering, and outreach. Our product replaces that with an agent. A recruiter describes who they need, or uploads a job description, and the agent builds an ideal candidate profile, finds matches, refines results from feedback, and drafts and sends personalized outreach. You’ll lead the founding team, a mix of senior, staff, principal, and mid-level engineers. The product is self-serve from day one, starting free and growing into paid and enterprise tiers.
What you’ll do
- Lead and grow a new engineering team, including senior, staff, and principal engineers, through hiring, coaching, and career development
- Own the end-to-end product: sign-up and onboarding, agent-driven search and calibration, shortlists, analytics, and tiering
- Shape the architecture early. Review technical designs and proposals and set direction
- Drive execution on an ambitious timeline across a large project, and make clear trade-offs with product and design on scope versus speed
- Partner closely with product and design, and with the teams behind outreach, candidate data, and AI/ML search and retrieval
- Establish the team’s engineering culture, processes, and operating rhythm from the ground up
What we’re looking for
- 3+ years experience managing engineering teams, including teams that include senior and staff engineers
- Strong people management: high EQ, empathy, and a record of growing engineers’ careers
- Deep technical background. You can contribute to architecture and evaluate trade-offs on a new system, even if you no longer code day to day
- A track record of delivering large, cross-functional projects on aggressive timelines, with good judgment about what to cut
Bonus
- Zero-to-one experience: building a new product or major surface from scratch, ideally at a startup, a mid-size company, or a product-led team inside a larger one
- Experience with AI/LLM-powered products, agents, or evaluation systems
- Experience with self-serve or product-led growth products (free-to-paid, usage-based limits) is a plus
Perks
Handshake delivers benefits that help you feel supported—and thrive at work and in life. The below benefits are for full-time US employees. 🎯 Ownership: Equity in a fast-growing company 💰 Financial Wellness: 401(k) match, competitive compensation, financial coaching 🍼 Family Support: Paid parental leave, fertility benefits, parental coaching 💝 Wellbeing: Medical, dental, and vision, mental health support, wellness stipend 📚 Growth: Learning stipend, ongoing development 💻 Remote & Office: Internet, commuting, and free lunch/gym in our SF office 🏝 Time Off: Flexible PTO, 15 holidays + 2 flex days 🤝 Connection: Team outings & referral bonuses Explore our mission, values, and comprehensive US benefits atjoinhandshake.com/careers.
Why work at Handshake
- Culture: Values include “Students first,” “Leave nothing to chance,” “Own the outcome,” “Invent and reinvent,” and “Olympic pace.” Emphasis on ownership, urgency, and constant evolution.
- Remote/Hybrid policy: Many roles are based in San Francisco or New York, but some positions (e.g., Trust & Safety Specialist, Support Specialist) are remote in the US. Recent openings show both office and remote options.
- Benefits: Health & wellness support, financial support, time off, modern offices with meals, snacks, and social activities. Strong focus on career growth and learning.
- Career growth: Rapid headcount growth suggests ample internal mobility; roles range from engineering (ML, AI, data) to customer success, partnerships, and product management.